Breakfast Topic: How well do you know your guildmates?
I used to have guildmates -- but now I just call them "friends." We abandoned the "guildmate" tag somewhere along the line a few years ago, after it became apparent that we all preferred adapting our gaming to our group size rather than our group size to our gaming. That's not to say we're not open to the idea of new people. But the people I play with on an ongoing basis across multiple games don't call each other "guildmates," even though we've never met in real life. We're on Facebook, in IM, and on TeamSpeak even when we're not gaming together. We're just "friends."
I've known some pretty nice guildmates who made great "game friends," though. I learned all the details and odd little things about them that you do when you spend entire evenings with people on a regular basis: the nicknames they call their family members and pets, what they like on their pizza, what they studied in college, what time they get up for work. Even so, we never developed that crossover bond that leads to offline friendship. I removed their cell numbers from my contacts list once there was no longer a need to see if they could fill in on an off night or to let them know to come quick, the world boss was up RIGHT NOW!
Still, I can't even imagine being in a guild where the only thing I knew about my guildmates was their character names. Simply unimaginable.
How well do you know your guildmates? Are they merely nice people you game with, or have you built a toasty little internet friendship? Not a few guilds make a habit of annual or even more frequent real-world meetups (like The Incredibles, above). Have you ever met your guildmates? How well do you know most of the folks you play with?
